


entanglement theory

by Dissonencia



Category: Bleach
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-18
Updated: 2015-06-28
Packaged: 2018-03-31 02:12:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3960517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dissonencia/pseuds/Dissonencia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[he's teaching her how to read; she's teaching him how to write; about happy endings and bad endings] it's the last day at the hospital and goodbyes are said.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He's teaching her how to read proper books.  _Because_  she reads  _romance_. Chewed-digested-spat  _out_  romance –predictable-young-adult-been-there-done-that-whatever-the-current-hype-is-about-love-conquers-all. Bullshit.

"I do not." A harsher voice bit too strong for a  _little_  girl, Rukia said, eyebrows furrowed, and lips bunched up. A teenager holed up in a bed; a patient with only her fantastical and dreamy and silly and bombastic books to accompany her; a patient who punched him five days after he was admitted. And there's dissonance, Ichigo thinks.

"I bet you don't know who Marlowe is." Classics are the best –pompous Ichigo rarely appears. He slouches in a chair opposite her; wooden and is a nightmare for his back. He's wearing a jacket; deep black, contradicting the airy and light room where she stays. A limp and worn copy of The Jew of Malta opened atop his knee, he speed-reads ridiculously well and he's very intelligent and Rukia knows he has no problem talking to her  _while_  reading.

An autumn afternoon, the sunlight from the only window layering them in a warm glow; her black hair shining in lighter honey rays, his orange hair brighter but not intimidating. He looks  _softer_  today. There is  _steadiness_ : half-nostalgic and half-wistful. And the day stretches longer; the winds slower; the pace unhurried.

A hospital: a special facility where they stay for a year-long observation;  _both_  at risk for Sudden Cardiac Arrest: Ichigo and Rukia.

 _However_ , she'll be leaving soon. Her fourteen-month stay ends today. His fifteen-month stay is far from over, ten more weeks. And he decides to visit her before she goes away. It's the first time he gets out of his room to visit another room. Perhaps, his form of farewell and Ichigo rarely gets out in general, if not for Shakespeare or Marlowe or de Cervantes or Chaucer (or ECGs or stress tests or blood works).

(Rukia is leaving soon and Ichigo likes to think he'll finally get rid of her outbursts, her tough attitude, her orders and demands, her sappy reading materials)

Rukia likes to keep her books around for frequent re-readings: fantastical and dreamy and silly and bombastic; a representation of a girl's poor heart; sad and pretty and dreamy. But nevertheless, these stories lead to a happy sunset –an amendment for the heart because all stories are love stories. And it's what everyone wants. (but it's not what everybody gets)

Ichigo likes to mock her for it: " _Can't you find another form of escapism_?" and " _you don't seem the type to like these_."

Because after all, real life is not as accommodating, not as pretty or dreamy or fantastical. There are no second glances, no happy sunsets, and magical meetings.

Ichigo gags at the astounding amount of  _corniness_  in her reading materials. In which Rukia reminds him it's not the Middle Ages anymore; his heroes inspired another era of contemporary ones and these contemporaries have inspired more modern ones-

"Don't you get it? These are all inspired from your favorites? Stemmed!"

On some days, Ichigo openly admits he hates Rukia and her reasoning. "No."

"So our last argument would be about happy endings and bad endings?"

They have arguments; seething arguments about their heroes; who's a better writer-stylist? Who revolutionized the worded imitation of life? About Chaucer and Meyer. Literary devices against each other. Sometimes, nobody wins. (they are the only two late teens in the department)

And sometimes he forgets: they are  _not_  healthy. That talking about happy endings and bad endings is just the same as talking about  _their_  endings; the totality of their lives for all its worth.


	2. Chapter 2

He thinks he's too old to be 19. Rukia agrees so.

Books, to him, are ideas framed in words, the stories melting, overflowing, happening in words and letters and phrases and paragraphs, the reader breathing the same air the character does. Apparently, there is something to be reveled in these quiet little words  _inside_  quiet little worlds bound in covers. He thinks it is debauchery when he comes across stories told in the most catastrophic of ways; pointless and soulless and dishonest. People are the greatest storytellers; people are also the greatest limiters to their own creativity.

Rukia doesn't answer immediately whenever he openly insults her choices.

For Rukia, people –grounded and limited- can only jump to childish fantasy and silly make-believe and ridiculous happy endings by way of imagination to fit the puzzle pieces. And it's  _okay_. She knows: life truly happens in the spaces of the paragraphs of the books she reads, and it's not always good, not as blissful, not as merry. And it's  _okay_. Escapism is fine under certain circumstances, there are grey areas –she doesn't deny this, and it's not always healthy. But against his views, no matter how good or bad the story was made, she argues: a person doesn't have to create a stunning masterpiece everyone will praise to live a significant life.

This difference allows, Ichigo thinks, interesting afternoon discussions between them.

(the day longer; the hour stretches; the sunlight seems endless)

Rukia moves from her position on the bed to a chair in front of him and imitates his sitting position. She wears night clothes in the afternoon like she's ready to fall asleep anytime, white and crisp, and Ichigo thinks she's absurd. (maybe because to him, this action connotes something else, like it has something to do with their sickness)

(Ichigo thinks she's not as pretty, not as charming or as appealing like the current teenage idols. She would not get his second glance. He could not single her out in a crowd. Yet he could not find anything to change in her)

She's unpacked. Like she's not really leaving –but the notice on the corkboard in the lobby writes otherwise, it writes farewell from the management.

The books litter her room, the usual meek decorations in her room still unmoved and her random stuff still in their place –scattered everywhere. She's everything but neat. She's a total departure from his standards on cleanliness.

Rukia sleeps on the second floor, in the room directly below his room. He can see her slumped in her wide windowsill and her pillows around her and endlessly reading illustrated books or long narratives (that he's sure filled with adjectives describing impossibly set bodies for males and females with melon cleavage and their poor dragon-castle-witch-vampire complex love plot).

He knows it is her habitual reading place because it is his as well, the wide windowsill in his own room.

And their first actual meeting months and months ago consisted of fallen (broken) coffee mug, fallen flower pot, stained pillows, coffee-drenched book of whatever fantastical love mess she was reading, a death glare from her looking up at him and him unapologetically looking down at her. The skies were blue and white. The trees were light-green. The sunlight was pastel that day.


	3. Chapter 3

The skies are blue and white. The trees are green. The sun is pastel yellow. Rukia notes, but not as yellow as the scrambled eggs on her breakfast, the trees are not as green as her curtains, the mixed blue and white color of her cup is brighter than the skies. Some things are just  _not quite perfect_  in the real world. The colors, for one, are bland and pale and insipid. (And her heart and its parts: aorta and ventricles and atria. Why do they work differently?)

Pages are better roadmaps and words easily disappear as she walks beside the heroine of her current obsession.

She prefers: a heroine so strong she can save an entire nation; a heroine clad in vermilion wielding daggers charging to a masked enemy clad in white and so evil he could wipe an entire nation but then he turns out to be a childhood friend and she recognizes him as his mask shatters and his vision clears and he accidentally wounds her and she dies and he despairs and enters eternal caging with her and so tragic, so tragic but lovely-!

_Plock! Plock!_

* * *

"It's not a love-story mess! Your stupid coffee ruined my only copy! It's a signed copy!"

"Hmn-mn. Guys with centipede abs and girls with melon cleavage. You can't fool me."

(she thought at first that his eyes were brown: a painfully common color)

* * *

Rukia shakily picks up her book dripping of hot coffee. Oh, what happened then? To her characters and their tragic story and their ending and the paper and ink are ruined and the book is unreadable and  _just who is that_?!

She looks up: death glare ready.

 _lub-dub. Dub-dub._  More often than not, her heart dislikes cooperating with her. _Dub-dub_. _Lub-lub. lub-dub._

She thinks he's  _that_  guy that lives on the floor above her. That guy  _as in_  that guy with a nasty temper, with a nasty shade of hair and with a nasty glare and is looking down at her unapologetically.

* * *

"You were so rude."

"I've been told."

"I hate you. You never said sorry."

(counterpoints; polyphony)

* * *

"Don't mind it," he yells from his window.

_Excuse me?_

"Excuse me?"

Rukia looks up at him. The pillows in her windowsill all drenched in brown murky liquid, the stench of coffee everywhere, and a broken potted flower plant beside her. The coffee-dripping, unreadable book in her hands.

"The cup." He answers, "don't mind the cup. I can get another one. Just get rid of that broken potted plant. Thanks."

The skies are blue and white. The trees are green. The sun is pastel yellow. On second thought, it's kind of a pretty day: a day too pretty for her to waste on punching someone so she retreats to her bed without saying anything else. And her heart. Oh her heart. Oh her poor book. Her poor weak heart.

* * *

"I like that moment…"

Ichigo furrows his eyebrows,  _that_  again.

"When my fist connected in your face one sunny day."

(then she laughs a silly laugh: girly and carefree and lighthearted)

* * *

She did punch him that day. And then learned that he was just admitted five days before.

[she furiously marched up to his room and found him in his extremely neat room with books stacked everywhere]

" _That will teach him_."

* * *

Stargazing in the terrace and dim bulbs lining a tree and almond blossoms in a milk bucket; she didn't think his eyes were really amber.

Sometime after their mandatory peace talk as ordered by the cardiac department admin officer and spending time watering potted plants in the rooftop greenhouse as a reprimand, Rukia challenged Ichigo to a friendly (furious and intense) game of jigsaw puzzle in the terrace (or a quiz about ultra-retro manga titles and animations " _he wouldn't know anything about Voltron: The Defender of the Universe or Voltes V, I'm sure of it_ ").

Needles to say, Ichigo would go for the jigsaw puzzle. When Rukia asked this, because of his injured jaw, he scowled, glared, and grimaced –which meant  _yes_.

 


	4. Chapter 4

Ichigo knows freedom; knows the way the sun rises in the morning: gold sunlight peeking in the small gaps between clouds and the inky blue of the sky; knows the heartbeat of a perfectly scored goal; knows the taste of traditional breakfast: miso soup and rice and fish. He knows the cool beatings of afternoon rain on his back.

There are many other things he knows: his mother's warm hand holding his on their way home; spending time with his sisters on weekends; his father's every day pranks on him. Likewise, there are many things he has yet to learn: the thrill of being 23 years of age; to be 30 and at prime; to be 70 and wise.

Instead, he's learning: ECG readings; the four walls in his neat and books-stacked room; cardiomegaly; the could have been/s; static and dreary routines for near-death  _docile_  people; how every little thing seems to matter immensely after being reminded of the reality of human interim; blue sunrise and red sunset in his room.

* * *

"Ichigo!"

"Ichigo!"

Ichigo stares at his open book, their first meeting was days after he was admitted. Rukia was the first patient-mate who made contact with him –a punch that stung for two days. (and maybe, a surprising reminder that not everyone in the department is docile)

"What?" he snaps, voice low, lifting his gaze from the book back to her face.  _Interim_. Rukia looks every bit as she was months ago.

He looks over at her books, the same old books with embarrassing cover pictures and equally embarrassing titles phrased using an extreme form of purple prose.

"You know these things are so-" Ichigo starts, there is something oddly electrifying in the air, after all, these books are his final target before she leaves tonight, "so romanticized and made commonplace to the point that they lost their meaning. I mean-"

 _Ah_ , Rukia ponders, looking at her books with bold gold and silver titles embossed in their covers and images of roses in various shapes framing scantily dressed women and abs-bearing men with backdrops of lighthouse or castle or forest greenery or ocean.

"-how do you know they're  _not_  all the same?"

He means: shy confessions, first dates, the other person's vengeful act, dramatic proclamation of eternal love, the villains  _just_  die, grand weddings, pre-decided happily ever after.  _Ah._

And: "how can you stomach them?"

There's another layer of tone in his voice that seems to ask the important and real questions:  _are you waiting for your own happily-ever-after? Do you really think there's a happily-ever-after for people like us?_

Ichigo, Rukia has come to know rather bitterly, has absolutely no time for anything associated with heart or romance or pinning. He came into the cardiac facility aloof and cold and with a nasty temper and with a teenage sob story. A could have been: a youth in perfect shape on his way to the national football team; handsome and tall and attention-grabbing: the orange hair and the scowl; he chooses his words carefully and answers in the most concise way possible; from a decent middle-class family; a fairly smart and hardworking guy: could have medical science as a degree.

Despite Ichigo's sharp intakes of breath when insulting her interests and despite her defending her books to death, it's  _really_  not the theatrical acts of romance she likes –which her books are known for.

Rukia knows,  _living_  doesn't just apply to starts and peaks and denouement and  _fin_ , like a story with completely plotted points and only the climax to glorify. Living is inevitable, not in breaks or gaps, but in  _commas and periods_ , there's always the next sentence or the next paragraph, living continues regardless of sad or happy moments.

"Ichigo, do you think these are too unrealistic?" She answers a question for a question, in which he answers an outright " _Yes_ ," without hesitation.

_(ah, "do you think there's a happily-ever-after for people like us?")_

"Is that why you don't like them?" it comes as cutting, months in the making. Ichigo reads politics and social issues and philosophy and principles and elegant prose and plays that play on these. After all, it is really easier to accept death as a hard fact-of-life  _than_  pinning for a happy ending that will never come.

"Yes, _"_ Ichigo answers again, meeting her eyes. He closes his book and puts it on top of her dresser. Rukia knows, Ichigo is  _resigned_  already.

* * *

His doctor said: "It's fine. Just don't do anything strenuous. Stay in your room to rest."

It's fine. Though it is not clear to him what he really wants to be in the future, though he doesn't really know where the path of life might take him, he felt  _robbed_.

Just don't do anything strenuous. Getting out of bed is inexplicably harder; a rock at the bottom of the river, but the heart beats on and on and on.

Stay in your room. Ichigo knows the way the sun sets; from his room –the large window with huge ledge- the sun is gold-burnished against the blistering red sky, layering everything in auburn and dark gold.

 


End file.
